“Kinda like The Sims... But with ghosts?”: A Qualitative Analysis of Video Game Re-finding Requests on Reddit

Abstract

With the advent of the retro-gaming movement there is an increasing interest in rediscovering games once played. ‘Tip of my Joystick’ is a Reddit community dedicated to the re-finding of forgotten games. In this subreddit, users describe games they wish to re-find so that other users may help them identify the game’s title. This community thus offers a unique opportunity for studying how players recall and describe games and play experiences of the past. This paper presents the results of an analysis of a random sample of 250 posts from this subreddit. The posts were analyzed in terms of what aspects of games they describe For the purpose of this analysis we developed a coding scheme consisting of 38 individual codes belonging to 9 different main categories. Our findings may contribute to research on game archiving and collection as they may help inform the design of better game search engines.